Parsing .pcap files with NMAP is actually an incorrect concept. NMAP (Network Mapper) is a security scanner tool used to discover hosts and services on a computer network, thus creating a “map” of the network. It can conduct host discovery, port scanning, version detection, and operating system detection, among other activities. However, NMAP does not have the ability to parse .pcap files.
.pcap, or Packet Capture Data files, are created by network sniffer tools like Wireshark, tcpdump, or by NMAP as well (source: https://nmap.org/book/nmap-formats-pcap-output.html). These files store raw data collected about network traffic, including packet data and network protocol overhead.
Parsing .pcap files means to analyze its contents in a more human-readable form, and for that, a tool like Wireshark or tcpdump, would be required, not NMAP.
Despite not having the ability to parse .pcap files, NMAP can generate them. For example, you can save the packets sent and received by NMAP during its execution to a .pcap file using the “—packet-trace” option (source: https://nmap.org/book/man-output.html). The command would look something like this:
```
nmap —packet-trace -p 80 example.com
```
This will create a .pcap file that contains all the packets that were sent and received during the scan.
To interpret the data collected in a .pcap file, Wireshark is a commonly used tool due to its extensive set of features and user-friendly graphical interface (source: https://www.wireshark.org/). After opening a .pcap file in Wireshark, you can apply different filters to analyze the data, for example, separating it by protocol, source, or destination IP, etc.
Tcpdump is another tool used to parse and analyze .pcap files. It works as a command-line packet analyzer and is typically used when access to a graphical user interface is not available. An example command to parse a .pcap file with tcpdump could look like:
```
tcpdump -nn -r example.pcap
```
In conclusion, NMAP is not designed or intended to parse .pcap files, although it can generate them. Other tools such as Wireshark or Tcpdump should be used to parse and interpret .pcap files instead.
